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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology

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From:
Christina Wahl <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 25 Sep 2013 12:54:41 +0000
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Bob asked me to share what I told him off-list:

My grandfather, a lifelong beekeeper (for 70 years, at peak 3000 colonies that he managed himself with his dad, sons, and brother) had lung trouble too.  He was never a smoker.  After DDT wiped out (most of) his bees in the '50s, and coincidentally he then came down with type 2 diabetes, he and my grandmother discovered and participated in the Natural Foods movement here in the northeast.  By then I was born.  I lived next door, and I remember their table....home-milled grain in homemade bread, homemade yoghurt, garden veggies and other good things.

I tagged along to the beeyards as soon as I could walk, and I remember lessons on how to light and use a smoker.  There was always some old burlap around to get it going, and then we added old sticks and pine cones scrounged from the ground and woods around the hives.

My grandfather died of lung cancer at 76.  My dad thought the smoke from the smoker did it.  He'd often hold his smoker between his knees...we all need another hand in the beeyard!

Now that I'm a physiology professor and understand the etiology of different cancers to some degree, I can say that most smoking-related lung cancers are caused by chronic and severe irritation, leading first to cellular dysplasia, then transformation, caused by the smoke particulates that accumulate on the lung's linings.  Some of these particulates get through the lung lining via macrophage action, and those can travel to, accumulate in, and irritate other internal tissues, such as the liver (I have an demo teaching slide showing "coal miner's liver"....yuck).  And of course, with tobacco we also have the drug effects of the inhaled substances, these include nicotine.  However, any kind of particulate-bearing smoke could potentially cause the kind of irritation that leads to dysplasia that leads to "precancerous" and then "cancerous" cell transformations.

Indeed, any airborne particles irritate the lungs.  Bee "dander" (never heard of that before!) could do it.  Allergies are a result of the lung macrophages cleaning up the junk, which gets trapped in the alveoli of the lungs and needs to be removed.  Once the material gets into the blood...the macrophages crawl through the alveolar walls back into the capillaries once they've collected the garbage....the immune system gets to work and creates antigens.  Then, when exposure happens again, there is local swelling and congestion that can lead to the "cough".  Antihistamines probably help to reduce the symptoms somewhat, if the beekeeper's cough is due to an allergy.  They won't help if the cough is due to dysplasia and fluid buildup.

Christina


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